What you're looking at here is the last picture of me with a talismanic piece of furniture. This cheap old dresser is almost exactly as old as I am. My mother put it together from a kit when she was pregnant with me, in the summer of 1955. For my first year and a half, it was mine alone, until my younger brother, Michael, was born at the end of 1957. Until I went away to college in 1973, I had one side of it, and Mike had the other (I don't remember who had which side). Sometime after college (again, I don't remember when) I inherited the whole thing, and it has accompanied me ever since, to Ann Arbor, Iowa City, Oxford, Ohio (briefly), back to Ann Arbor, and finally to Austin. It hasn't always held underwear and sweaters—during the five years I shared a house with my wife, it stood in the back room and held tools and a lot uncategorizable junk. Then, when I moved out of the house and into the apartment where I still live, it went back to being my dresser again.
It's been falling apart for years, just like I have. It was pretty cheap to begin with, very thin pine panels with only a few nails, and mostly held together with glue. The runners that held up the drawers started coming off years ago, and for most of the time I've owned it—most of my life, in other words—I've had to wrestle the damn drawers back in every single time I've pulled one out. For the last twenty years, at least, I have arranged my clothes in it the same way, shorts in the upper left drawer, t-shirts in the upper right, socks in the second drawer down on the left, etc. The bottom right drawer has always held my camping stuff—hiking socks, compass, binoculars, cook set—and winter clothing—long johns, scarves, gloves. The top of it has always been covered with jars of pennies, keys, my wallet, drifts of movie tickets and ATM receipts, and several generations of clock radios.
About a year and a half ago, when I had an out-of-town visitor coming to stay with me for a week, I got self-conscious about it and spent a couple of hours one afternoon regluing the runners with superglue. Quite the tricky effort, that, since I had to empty all the drawers, put newspaper on the carpet, and then nervously apply the glue, knowing that each time I reattached a runner, I had to get it right the first time, since the glue was so unforgiving. (I got most of them wrong, too, so that sliding the drawers back in was even harder after I "fixed" the runners than it had been before.) I also had to lock my cats out of the bedroom, for obvious reasons, which meant closing my bedroom door, which I'd never done before (it's a small apartment and I live alone). The cats didn't like it much, and the stress of working with that awful glue was compounded by their relentless scratching at the door. And, of course, when I finished, lightheaded with fumes and with a couple of fingers sort of stuck together, I found I couldn't open the door. My apartment is charming, but old, and the ancient doorknob ground all the way around without doing anything. My options at this point were rather limited. The phone, naturally, was on the other side of the door. I was locked in with my computer and could have e-mailed somebody, I suppose, but that just seemed humiliating. I could have pounded on my wall for my neighbor or yelled out the window, but this was back before the Day Job when I was still living as a freelancer (if you can call that living), and none of my neighbors was home during the day. Of course, if life were like the TV shows I grew up with and my cats were not cats but, say, Lassie, I could have shouted through the door, "I'm in trouble, girl! Go get Dad!" But then, life isn't, they weren't, and my dad died a couple years before. Finally (and rather anticlimactically) I remembered that I'd left my hammer and screwdriver in the bathroom (for another bit of preemptive maintenance for my visitor), so I finally released myself by removing the hinges and taking the whole door off. (And have never shut the door since.)
The whole adventure, of course, was mostly pointless, since over the last year or so, all the runners have peeled off again, and it was either reglue them again (which would mean sanding off the glue from the last regluing, not to mention the original glue my mother used, which I probably should have sanded off in the first place and didn't, which is probably why my reglued runners all came off again) (honestly, I'm nobody's idea of a handyman) or get rid of the thing and get a new dresser.
There were three reasons not to. One was I couldn't afford it, not if I wanted to get a new dresser and not some equally temperamental used one from Goodwill. The second is that I come from a family that is congenitally unable to throw anything away. And the third is that, years ago, when I mentioned to my mother over the phone that I was thinking of getting rid of it, she said, "Oh, don't do that! I put that dresser together when I was carrying you, and I've always been afraid that if anything happened to it, something would happen to you." Of course, she once said the same thing about the soap opera As the World Turns, which she started watching when she was pregnant with me, and which she was afraid to stop watching, for fear that my plane would go down in the Amazon or I'd be murdered by my evil twin, or whatever happens to people in soap operas. Now, of course, I'm flashing on the image of my mother as a young woman, hugely pregnant and sweating in an unairconditioned house in Okemos, Michigan, in the summer of 1955, sitting with her legs splayed on the hardwood floor of the living room with the pieces of the dresser spread all around her, and she's lightheaded from the fumes of the mid-50s equivalent of superglue and watching As the World Turns as she pieces the thing together. And now don't I feel like a heel for finally getting rid of the thing.
But hey, she stopped watching As the World Turns years ago, and my evil twin hasn't shown up yet. I even flew over the Andes some years ago and nothing happened (okay, a little cannibalism, but surely the world can spare a soccer player or two). And biology, I'm pretty certain, isn't destiny, so there goes reason number two. And, finally, the tipping point (as the kids say) was that my youngest brother, Tom—who is equally sentimental about old stuff, but never shared a room with me like Mike did, and so has no particular attachment to this particular dresser—gave me a gift card for Ikea for Christmas. (Yeah, you heard me. Ikea. Deal with it.) So now I have a very handsome, new, taller dresser that holds more than the old one did, and whose drawers slide with a touch in and out on little metal wheels in brackets that are screwed, not glued, to the side of the dresser. Even better, since the drawers are new, my t-shirts smell like fresh-cut pine when I put them on. So not only do I have the manly sense of accomplishment that comes from assembling something from an Ikea flatpack (with only a few pieces left over), but I smell like a lumberjack, at least for an hour or two.
Still, I hung onto the old dresser for a few days, mainly because I wanted to wait to put it out until Saturday morning, when people cruising for yard sales drive through my neighborhood. Then, this morning, I didn't get up until nearly ten and almost didn't put it out, thinking it was probably too late to get the yard salers, but finally, I screwed (not glued) my courage to the sticking place and carted the thing down to the edge of my building's parking lot. Because my family is also pretty sentimental about old stuff, even trashy old stuff, I took some pictures of it, and just as I was about to go in, a woman walking her dog passed by and I asked her to take my picture with it. When I told her why I wanted the picture ("My mother made that dresser the year I was born"), she lowered the camera. "Your mother made it?" she said, and her look said, "You heartless bastard." So I hastened to add, "I mean, she assembled it. From a kit. Like Ikea." That seemed to reassure her, and she snapped the picture you see above, wished me a happy New Year, and went on her way. I taped a sign to the dresser that said, in big block letters, "FREE. Needs some regluing, but all the pieces are here." It sat there all afternoon, and I was afraid I'd have to carry it upstairs again in case it rained tonight, but when I came out at 4 this afternoon for my run, it was gone. I don't know who took it—for all I know, it could have been someone in my building, and I'm sitting less than a hundred feet from it right now—but whoever did, whoever you are, use it in good health.
If this were one of those anodyne personal essays you read in the Times sometimes, or hear on NPR, there'd be something meaningful and poignant at this point about middle-age, rites of passage, the legacy of one's parents, Ikea's not so bad, or worse, some faux-Proustian insight about how simple objects are imbued with memory. And lord knows I'm not saying that this post isn't anodyne—it's seventeen hundred words about a fucking dresser—but the essay would use this experience as some smug Life Lesson (and probably be a lot shorter). All I'm saying is, I lived with that thing my whole life, and now it's god knows where. Because what if my mother was right? What if, like that old song, "My Grandfather's Clock," whatever happens to the dresser, happens to me (or vice versa)? Maybe the best case scenario is that stuff happens to the dresser instead of happening to me—The Dresser of Dorian Gray. Either way, now that it's gone, I'll never know. However long I live, and however I go, when I go, it's entirely possible that my last sentimental, superstitious thought will be, "Oh hell. Somebody dumpstered the dresser."
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